1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention generally relates to computer systems, and more particularly, to methods and apparatuses which detect the use and viewing of electronic advertising means such as web (HTML) pages, Applets or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
The development of computerized distributed information resources, such as the "Internet", allows users to link with servers and networks, and retrieve vast amounts of electronic information that was previously unavailable using conventional electronic mediums. Such electronic information increasingly is displacing more conventional techniques of information transmission, such as newspapers, magazines, and even television.
The term "Internet" is an abbreviation for "Inter network", and refers commonly to a collection of computer networks that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols. TCP/IP is an acronym for "Transport Control Protocol/Interface Program", a software protocol developed by the Department of Defense for communication between computers.
Electronic information transferred between computer networks (e.g., the Internet) can be presented to a user in hypertext, a metaphor for presenting information in a manner in which text, images, sounds, and actions become linked together in a complex non-sequential web of associations that permit the user to "browse" through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. These links are often established by both the author of a hypertext document and by the user.
For example, traveling among hypertext links to the word "iron" in an article displayed within a graphical user interface might lead the user to the periodic table of the chemical elements (e.g., linked by the word "iron"), or to a reference to the use of iron in weapons in Europe in the Dark Ages. The term "hypertext" is used to describe documents, as presented by a computer, that express the non-lineal structure of ideas, as opposed to the linear format of books, film, and speech.
Hypertext, especially in an interactive format where choices are controlled by the user, is structured around the idea of offering a working and learning environment that parallels human thinking--that is, an environment that allows the user to make associations between topics, rather than moving sequentially from one topic to the next, as in an alphabetic list. In other words, hypertext topics are linked in a manner that allows users to jump from one subject to other related subjects during a search for information.
Networked systems using hypertext conventions typically follow a client/server architecture. A "client" is a member of a class or group that uses the services of another class or group to which it is not related. In the context of a computer network, such as the Internet, a client is a process (i.e., roughly a program or task) that requests a service which is provided by another program. The client process uses the requested service without having to "know" any working details about the other program or the service itself. In networked systems, a client is usually a computer that accesses shared network resources provided by another computer (i.e., a server).
A "server" is typically a remote computer system which is accessible over a communications medium such as the Internet. The server scans and searches for raw (e.g., unprocessed) information sources (e.g., news wire feeds or news groups). Based upon such requests by the user, the server presents filtered electronic information to the user as server responses to the client process. The client process may be active in a second computer system, and communicate with one another over a communications medium that allows multiple clients to take advantage of the information-gathering capabilities of the server.
Clients and servers communicate with one another using the functionality provided by a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or other interactive protocol (e.g. COBRA, or IIOP), or secure links (e.g. HTTPS). The World Wide Web (WWW) or, simply, the "web," includes all servers adhering to this protocol, which are accessible to clients via a Universal Resource Location (URL). Internet services can be accessed by specifying Universal Resource Locators that have two basic components: a protocol to be used and an object path name. For example, the Universal Resource Locator address, "http://www.uspto.gov" (i.e., the "home page" for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office), specifies a hypertext transfer protocol ("http") and a path name of the server ("www.uspto.gov").
The server name is associated with a unique numeric value (TCP/IP address). Active within the client is a first process, known as a "browser", that establishes the connection with the server, and presents information to the user. The server itself executes corresponding server software that presents information to the client in the form of HTTP responses. The HTTP responses correspond to "web pages" constructed from a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Dynamic HTML, Java Applets, or other server-generated data.
A "web page", as used hereinafter, defines a viewing area that can be manipulated by the end user, such that the contents may not be seen in their entirety. As defined, a web page may be, for example, a data file written in a hypertext language that may have text, graphic images, and even multimedia objects such as sound recordings or move video clips associated with that data file. The web page can be displayed as a viewable object (e.g. a window) within a computer system. A viewable object can contain one or more components such as spreadsheets, text, hot links, pictures, sound, and video objects. A web page can be constructed by loading one or more separate files into an active directory or file structure that is then displayed as a viewable object within a graphical user interface.
When a client workstation sends a request to a server for a web page, the server first transmits (at least partially) the main hypertext file associated with the web page, and then loads, either sequentially or simultaneously, the other files associated with the web page. A given file may be transmitted as several separate pieces via TCP/IP protocol. The constructed web page is then displayed as a viewable object on the workstation monitor. A web page may be "larger" than the physical size of the monitor screen, and devices such as graphical user interface scroll bars can be utilized by the viewing software (i.e., the browser) to view different portions of the web page.
Most text displayed by a web browser is formatted using standard HTML. An HTML file is a text file that contains both the text to be displayed and markup tags that describe how the text should be formatted by the web browser. The HTML markup tags support basic text formatting, such as paragraph breaks, bullet lists, tables, graphs, charts, and so forth. In addition to these basic text formatting tags, HTML provides tags defining graphical user interface components. HTML also can be used to display well known graphical user interface components such as radio buttons, check boxes, scrolling lists of selectable text, and various other such components at the web browser itself.
As the Internet has increased in popularity, the number of users and the amount of time they spend using the Internet has increased proportionately, thus, allowing a new field for exploiting various products via the means of advertising.
Advertisers are now able to embed their advertisements on web pages and Java Applets in a fashion similar to that of billboards or other type media where they would expect a user interested in that type of product to normally visit. In contrast to prior media, however, the Internet has provided the user with the ability to control not only the type of content that they desire to view, but whether or not entire portions of the content will be viewed (e.g. only viewing the text portions of a web page, excluding the images portions not scrolled into view, or advertising portions).
Consequently, today advertisers are charged a flat rate for space on web pages. Unfortunately, since the user is able to direct what content they wish to see, and whether the entire content will be viewed, certain advertisements on a web page may not even be seen by a given user.
It would, therefore, be a distinct advantage to have a method and apparatus that would allow varying rates to be charged to the advertisers for placing their advertisements on a web page based upon whether or not these advertisement are actually seen by the user, and for the amount of time for which the advertisement was viewed. The present invention provides such a method and apparatus.